Page 134 of The Surviving Sky
Standing there in the surreal copse, Iravan trembled from head to toe. The truth of this knowledge slammed into him. On the mountain, he saw himself lift a foot and set it down on the path toward clarity.
The shock of it sent a chill through his spine.
The first path disappeared, taking away the promise of Ahilya and all his unlived lives.
Hegasped—thiswas a path to death, then, ultimate, irreversible death; no more lives in the future, now truly a final end.
Unaware of the choice he had made, Ahilya finished tying the rope around him. She coiled the other end around herself so they could move but not separate.
Very carefully, Iravan released the Deepness.
He jerked as his two visions collapsed. He stood in the copse fully, watching his wife tie intricate knots on the rope. The Etherium faded to a blur like he was seeing it from a great distance. He stumbled on it, forward and upward, to the mountain peak.
Shuddering, Iravan felt for the Deepness in his mind again. It sprang up, right next to the Moment, two caverns instead of one; the Moment filled with pinpricks of stars, and the Deepness with forceful blackness.
There was, he realized, a way to move from the Moment into the Deepness and vice versa, a thin conduit of nothingness that connected the two caverns.
Yet the Etherium, despite its wavering imagery, remained ever-present, almost a superimposed image behind the two caverns. Was the third vision a space that existedbeyondany kind oftrajection—Ecstasyor otherwise? Could non-trajectors sense the Etherium too, then? Did he have control there? He barely understood the Deepness, and the Etherium was more, so much more.
Ahilya approached him, offering her hand.
He engulfed it in his. “Don’t let go.”
Gripping her tight, Iravan dove into the yawning black cavern of the Deepness. He summoned theMoment—bythinking about it. Simultaneously, he gathered the energy of Ecstasy to him. A thin golden current of light emerged from his dust mote. He guided it into the Moment, aiming it for where he knew the stars of the green dust existed. The golden jet struckand—
In front of the two of them, the sparkling green dust froze, unmoving.
The two stood in a glimmering world of frozen particles.
“It’s never done that,” Ahilya breathed, fascinated.
She reached a hand to touch the closest sparkles but her hand went through the frozen dust. Iravan imitated her and flinched back. He couldfeelthe particles, warm and somehow pulsing, alive. He exchanged a nervous glance with Ahilya.
“Whatisthis?” she asked.
“Ithink—it’slike the yakshas. It exists at a higher state of consciousness than human beings, so architects would never have noticed it. But this dust iseverywhere. Everywhere in the Moment.”
Iravan swallowed, imagining the star-studded universe of the Moment far more cluttered and complex than he had ever known it to be. In the second vision, the Moment glittered like a globule, his stream of golden light pouring into it.
“Can you do anything with it?” she asked, her voice low.
Iravan shifted the dust with his hand. The frozen particles moved where he placed them, but nothing else happened.
“Huh,” Ahilya said. “Maybe try a principle of trajection?”
“It won’t work. When architects traject, they connect constellation lines betweenstars—”Iravan cut himself off, his eyes widening.
He touched the frozen green dust in front of him, and memory spiked within him. The frozen dust reminded him of the luminous stars within the universe of the Moment, but each star there was a plant’s possible state of being. Could this dustbe…purepossibility, independent of an attached consciousness?
On the mountain path, he saw himself lurch forward and upward to painful clarity.
In the copse, Iravan connected one particle to another with invisible constellation lines. The dust glittered, then solidified into a simple wall, the first true structure of this bizarre habitat.
Ahilya lifted his arm. His constant glow had remained the same, except instead of the vines of trajection or the wings of supertrajection, strange spirals now glowed and disappeared.
“I don’t think I’m as good an Ecstatic Architect as I was a normal one,” he said.
“Not necessarily a bad thing,” she answered fervently. “But it looks like you can manipulate this dust. Maybe make pathways, not walls?”
